Windows XP Session 3 Initialization Failure

Hi Everyone
In the interest of not hijacking someone else' troubleshooting thread, I'm starting a new one, but I don't know if anyone will be able to help me at this point. Here's the situation:

I passed an older HP computer "sight unseen" on to a friend to let his kids use so they wouldn't keep bugging him for his laptop. It was all "new" (three years ago!), sealed in the box and never used (the person that bought it passed away) but now that my friend is trying to set it up, it won't boot. He is completely computer illiterate but I walked him through trying to boot in safe mode but he still got the same blue screen of death error. I told him I'd try to research the issue for him as best I could and head out to his place over the weekend to look at it closer. I'm hoping someone here might have some ideas or let me know what to check for when I get there.

Here's the wee bit of info I have:
HP Pavilion running XP, approximately 3 years old (not sure where/how it was stored)
Regardless of whether its regular or safe mode boot, it comes up with the same error message:

On a more humorous note, trying to get him to read that error message to me was rather entertaining. He was calling colons "those two dots on top of each other," parentheses were "those thingies that you put on stuff you say that you aren't really saying" and semi-colons were "those sperm looking thingies." LMAO :-)

If it has been sitting in the box for three years the CMOS battery is probably dead. I may be as simple as putting a valid date in the CMOS. Windows is funny about starting some apps prior to the date they were written. If it is mediacenter edition again it could be the CMOS configuration is out of wack. See what is available from setup and the try the boot.

Hi!
Thanks for the feedback. I would have answered sooner but somehow my settings here on the site were set to not notify me of updates. I was trying to work the situation last night and I can't even get it boot into Safe Mode, from the CD Drive, or open the BIOS section. I am totally lost on how to proceed at this point. What is involved in checking/replacing the CMOS battery.

Thanks!
Deana

If it has been sitting in the box for three years the CMOS battery is probably dead. I may be as simple as putting a valid date in the CMOS. Windows is funny about starting some apps prior to the date they were written. If it is mediacenter edition again it could be the CMOS configuration is out of wack. See what is available from setup and the try the boot.

I spent a couple of days over the holiday weekend housesitting and worked on this the whole time I was there, but couldn't make any headway. I looked inside and didn't see anything that was really obviously a battery but I did find something that looked like a likely candidate for a battery housing--black and of the right diameter but I didn't see a way to take that off short of removing the entire motherboard and looking for the screw (or whatever is holding it on place) on the underside.

When I try to boot it, I always get the blue screen with that same Initialization error--even in safe mode. The only way I get it halfway interested in loading is when I choose Safe Mode with Directory Service Restore. It would give me a different screen as if it were going to boot very briefly but then jumped to the same Blue Screen of Death.

I tried hitting F10 to try to do a full system restore (no data to lose after all!) and it hangs at about 20%. When my friend got home from vacation, I told him to try again and he hung at 20% as well.

As far as dates, I'm guessing the operating system is the EARLY version XP somewhere along the lines of 2002 because it lists the operating system as "Whistler" which, as I understand it, is the original name that XP went by during development. The old receipts from the original purchase were dated 2003, so its actually quite a bit older than I originally thought.

I think I'm going to see if I can get my friend to just drop it off at my place to tinker with because its too hard going back and forth and then trying to pull things from memory to post about when I get home. I sure would like to get this going so his kids and wife have something to bang around on other than his laptop. He's lost custody of that through all of this and just uses his phone to check his mail now! It was free so we don't want to put too much money into it but if we could get it going for less than $100 it might be worth it--even if that means taking it in to a tech.

You just have to open the system and find it. Normally a round large watch battery (about 3/4 inch diameter) set in the motherboard.

What happens when you boot it up does it show anything and what are the settings on the CMOS for the CDROM, Harddrive and date?

Sitting in a box for many years..... Moisture. First reach in and unpug/replug a couple of times anything that even looks like it may be plugged... RAM, drives, CPU [yep, even though the pins should be gold plated...], any cables [both ends]. Then leave the thing switched on for a day or two, or five... interfere with it now and then to get the hdd spinning up. Generated heat may remove the effects of moisture after a bit.
A rundown CMOS battery: it will only lose the date and time, anything else is not important at this stage.